Pittman Poised to Break Decade-Plus Cycle

One more SEC win will catapult him into different class of Arkansas football coaches

Arkansas Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman celebrates with fans on the field after a 19-14 win over the Tennessee Volunteers at Razorback Stadium in Fayetteville, Ark. / Michael Morrison-Hogs on SI Images

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — With the win over Mississippi State Saturday, Sam Pittman finds himself in position to finish with no more than four losses in the SEC play if his Hogs can figure out a way to come down with at least one more win.

It seems like a pretty big deal. If Arkansas can take down Ole Miss, Texas or Missouri, all three of which look beatable on any given day, the Hogs will be 4-4 in conference and headed to a bowl game with a 7-5 record provided Louisiana Tech doesn't roll into Fayetteville and pull an upset.

However, finishing with only four SEC losses used to not be a big deal at all. In fact, the Razorbacks' inaugural season in the league under Jack Crowe and interim coach Joe Kines that featured the infamous loss to The Citdel may have felt like a disaster, but Arkansas only lost four conference games that year.

From 1998 when Houston Nutt took over until Bobby Petrino's final season in 2011, Arkansas almost never fell below .500 in SEC play. Even Danny Ford, who preceded Nutt, finished with a winning conference record half the time, including a 6-2 year in 1995.

Nutt is the standard bearer for SEC success at Arkansas. His Hogs finished without a losing conference record in seven of his 10 seasons, including a 6-2 year in 1998 and 7-1 in 2006. Petrino looked as if he might challenge Nutt by finishing .500 or above in SEC play, including back-to-back 6-2 records at the height of the SEC West's power in 2010 and 2011, until he literally drove the Arkansas program into the ditch, getting himself fired in the process.

However, it's what has happened in the 13 seasons since that make what Pittman is attempting to do seem like such a big deal. If his Hogs pull this off, he will be the first coach since Petrino to have multiple non-losing SEC records.

The only other coach to have even one other than Pittman is Bielema who had his lone winning conference record at 5-3 in 2015. A 4-4 finish in 2021 en route to a 9-4 season that had the college football world in love with the Hogs coach while Arkansas rose as high as No. 8 in the country and concluded with Razorbacks fans begging for Pittman to get a new contract is the most recent SEC success.

Of course, with one more win, Pittman will get to say last season was the only of his tenure where Arkansas didn't get a bowl invite. However, it's clear he's looking to higher accolades, and avoiding another losing record to break the streak of coaches without multiple .500 SEC records is foremost on that list right now.

"I've never been to a bad bowl game, so we're going to try to get to one," Pittman said. "That's not the goal. That's next week's goal."

Of course, if that goal is met next week, he joins a different class of coach not seen in over a decade around Fayetteville. At that point, it becomes less about keeping his job, and, instead, about building his overall legacy.

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